(NewsNation) — Thousands of displaced residents and their elected officials are beginning to clean up and rebuild after dozens of deadly and destructive tornadoes swept through wide swaths of the Midwest and South in less than a week.

Jane Cage hopes many of them look to Joplin, Missouri, for what’s possible. 

In 2011, one of the deadliest, most destructive and costliest tornadoes in U.S. history hit the town’s city center. How Joplin rebuilt is a story of more than a decade of perseverance and resilience. The key to their success, many NewsNation spoke with said, was the work of a citizen advisory team. 

This group of everyday volunteers tirelessly worked to reimagine what Joplin could be — from funneling relief money to where it was needed the most, to holding city planning sessions with residents, to advocating for safer yet affordable changes in building codes. 

“We all felt a lot of determination to make something happen, just to honor all the lives that were lost,” said Cage, a volunteer who led the efforts and now teaches about disaster planning and recovery with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“Everyone is around in the response phase, when you’re looking at a flattened high school … those make big news,” Cage said. “But sometimes the attention that a community gets ends when the next bad thing happens.” 

That’s why many in Joplin are so passionate about the citizen-led model of rebuilding a town. “At the end of the day, the community has to be able to take recovery leadership into their own hands, because you can’t wait for everyone else to do it,” she said. 

Build back better

While more than 1,000 tornadoes hit in the U.S. each year, this one was particularly devastating. 

The F5 was more than a mile wide and on the ground for six miles, right through the most populated areas of Joplin. Making the emergency response worse was that the storm decimated buildings often used during a disaster, including the local high school and a major hospital. 

“This is just etched in my mind: Those people … just in shock and just walking down the streets, walking down the sidewalk, not running, just … walking,” Troy Bolander, Joplin’s director of planning, development & neighborhood services, said of the first hours after the storm. 

About 30% of the town was completely flattened by the twister, including 4,000 homes, more than 500 businesses and even parts of the sewer system. There was so much work that FEMA recommended forming a citizen-led group to help in long-term planning, even as officials were scrambling to get people sheltered and fed.

Within weeks, the committee held listening meetings with residents, including those in the temporary housing. Out of those meetings emerged a vision for Joplin.

“(To) build back everything, just as it was … is really tempting,” Cage said. “That’s the biggest philosophical decision that a community has to face post-disaster: Do you build back quicker? Or do you build back better?”

The town did build back quickly. At one point, there was an average of five homes being built a week, as locals leveraged the federal funding, donations and volunteers that flooded in.

Yet spurred by residents’ ideas, it became more beautiful, too. The stormwater collection system became a lake and public park. New medical and dental schools came to the city. The local high school was rebuilt with a storm shelter big enough to protect surrounding residents. 

“People were vested in it because they had all worked on it; we had all been asking their opinions,” Cage said. “Because of that, it made it more likely that (the plan) would succeed.”

The city created more walkable commercial corridors, and zoning codes were changed to make new homes safer in future storms.

The planning took careful consideration. At the time, Joplin’s median household income was $36,459, and nearly 18% of the population was living in poverty. Ideas drawn up in the committee were not always feasible.

Bolander recalled a proposal to require shelter rooms in every home, an idea they walked away from, opting for other affordable safety requirements.

“I remember having a call from an elderly lady, saying, ‘Please don’t require this. If there is that several thousand dollars in extra expense, I cannot rebuild,’” he said,

This progress was the result of residents’ determination not only to make a plan, but to carry it through for the years required to do so.

Today, Joplin’s story has been studied and saluted by scientists, sociologists and emergency planners, and even informing national public policy. But for locals wrestling with their own disaster, the citizen advisory committee documented what they learned in a free online guide.

“I tell everyone in a community with a recent disaster not to be afraid to reach out,” Cage said. “Ten years later, 11 years later … we still needed to pay it forward.”